Catch the mad fun of klezmer

February 07, 2004|By Judith Green Special to the Morning Call -- Freelance

The interview with klezmer musician David Krakauer was a real New York phone call. He was on his cell phone, pacing the sidewalk in front of the Mannes College of Music on East 85th Street, when a trash truck came down the street. He stopped talking on the phone long enough to say, "No, it's not my car."

Like many a New York musician, Krakauer makes a collage living by playing and teaching. He teaches clarinet and chamber music at Mannes, Manhattan School of Music and Queens College. He records, he plays clubs, he goes on tour with Klezmer Madness, he plays a clarinet concerto in California, a chamber music festival in a summer resort, a jazz gig with his old friend Anthony Coleman.

Klezmer, which is central to his musical life and Jewish identity, has been referred to as "Jewish jazz." This oversimplification makes some Jews and a lot of jazz musicians shudder.

But in the case of Krakauer, whose clarinet is at home in a string quartet, a klezmer band, and a jazz combo, it's the simple truth. Klezmer Madness mixes Jewish folk music, African-American jazz, late 20th-century experimental music and the colors of several non-Western cultures to create a new sound.

The focus of an immense revival for the better part of a decade, Klezmer is the Jewish popular music of 19th-century Eastern Europe: the entertainment at weddings and feasts, at dances and watering holes. It's played on portable instruments -- clarinet, violin, accordion, double bass -- in keeping with the pack-up-and-flee lives of so many Eastern European Jews. It relies on sweet-and-sour tunes and harmonies that also reflect Jewish life in ghettos and shtetls from Poland to Turkey and Iberia to the Balkans.

"It sounded like the voice of my grandmother, who spoke with a very strong Yiddish accent," says Krakauer, whose name means, in fact, someone who comes from Krakow, the Polish city memorialized in the film "Schindler's List." Why, he does not know. His great-grandfather came from a village near Bialystok, Poland, which was a couple of days' journey from Krakow.

His grandmother emigrated to the United States around the turn of the century and ended up in, of all places, Lincoln, Neb. (She got on a train in New Jersey and got off when it stopped.) "Wyatt Earp's mistress was named Epstein," says Krakauer, "and Epstein was my grandmother's maiden name. So who knows?"

A classically trained musician, Krakauer attended New York's High School for Music and Art, then Juilliard. In high school, he played in a band organized by Anthony Coleman, where the music ranged from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk to Coleman's own compositions.

"After college, I temporarily abandoned jazz," he says, "but I played a lot of new music, experimental music, and created an improvisatory style. And I felt like a didn't have a home for all of it."

In the late '80s, though he was a full-time member of the Naumburg Award-winning Aspen Wind Quintet, he met players of Greek and Turkish music who asked him to recommend someone who could learn the Balkan clarinet style and join them. He asked for a chance to try and went on to play with the Klezmatics, the first big name of the klezmer revival.

"For me, it was a sense of coming home," he says. "Jazz, improvisation, interpretation. It all made sense, playing klezmer."

In a performing life that mixes a concerto by Mozart, a quintet for clarinet and strings by Brahms, a klezmer-based chamber work such as the award-winning "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind," written by Osvaldo Golijov for him and the Kronos Quartet, Krakauer has to be careful of his sound and his approach.

Klezmer requires a completely different sound, he says. "Though the clarinet is very much a human-voice kind of instrument, the klezmer sound is raw, more explicitly vocal." His first musical love was the great New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who had "a very unusual, very unorthodox sound." Krakauer found resonances of that sound in klezmer music.

For the clarinet, klezmer melodies are distinguished by an ornament called the krechts: a sob or squeeze, like a catch in the voice. "Though klezmer is a completely secular music," he says, "it has strong roots in cantorial singing." That is where the krechts comes from: "music that laughs and cries at the same time."

The colleagues in Klezmer Madness include Will Holshouser, a free-land accordionist at home in styles from French cabaret to Cajun; Nicki Parrott, bass, who also plays with the Klezmatics; Michael Sarin, a drummer whom he first heard playing with Anthony Coleman's band, and Sheryl Bailey, electric guitar.

"The criteria for Klezmer Madness is being creative and being open. These people are all creative and wonderful," he says. "There are a lot of very, very creative people locked into their own thing, and that's not what I want. We use klezmer as a point of departure, freely commenting on it."

Krakauer wants the elements of klezmer music, as he plays it, to be clear and individual. "My goal is to never make it into fusion. As a klezmer musician, I am a practitioner of a traditional art form."

He tells of one little Jewish lady who came up to him after a concert and said, "I was prepared to hate your music when I saw the electric guitar and the drum set." Instead, Krakauer says, she found that it was still klezmer, and it still spoke to her.